


There's a Ghost Down Every Street

by paperstorm



Series: Aftermath [1]
Category: The Old Guard (Comics), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Anal Sex, Angst, Bottom Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani, Bottom Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Canon Queer Character of Color, Canon Queer Relationship, Emotional Hurt, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Explicit Sexual Content, Hopeful Ending, Immortal Husbands Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Joe getting the softness he deserves, M/M, POV Alternating, Panic Attacks, Porn with Feelings, Post-Canon, Returning to Malta (The Old Guard), Romance, Switching, a sex scene where they're very sad and it doesn't go well, dumb boys who should just talk to each other but don't, heaps o' emotions, no redemption for Booker in this one either
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-06
Updated: 2020-10-11
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:14:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 19,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26327713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperstorm/pseuds/paperstorm
Summary: Joe has been so thoroughly torn in two. Half of his heart wants to drag Nicky into his arms, kiss him until neither of them can breathe, whisper to him until they feel safe and whole again, find salvation in him like they have since long before Joe lost the ability to properly gauge the passing of time. His other half can’t bear to even look at Nicky for too long. He can’t see Nicky’s eyes, normally wide and beautiful and the color of sea-glass, without recalling them screwed up in pain. He can’t see Nicky’s skin without remembering it sliced into, pieces extracted, the stain of blood that lingered. He can’t see Nicky’s hair without remembering it caked in blood, too.//Nicky and Joe return to Malta after the events of the movie while Nile and Andy head for a safehouse in South America, because they're both a lot more wounded by it all than they'd like to admit, and are desperate to find each other again.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: Aftermath [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1965853
Comments: 173
Kudos: 500





	1. Clouds

**Author's Note:**

> This is a companion piece to my fic [Hands Battered but Hearts Survive](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26031748). 
> 
> Title is from the song Youth In Retrospect by Deaf Havana
> 
> Please be warned there is a sex scene in chapter 3 that begins consensual but if you were extremely sensitive to such triggers, could be read as just a tiny bit dub-con, in that one character stops enjoying himself halfway through and doesn't speak up about it (but the other does notice, and stops it.)

“Maybe we shouldn’t be doing this.”  
  
Nicky looks at him from across the room. It’s dim, the windows small and the overhead lighting yellow and grainy. The wallpaper is peeling in a few places and the carpeting is worn and stained. It’s nothing like the places they’ve stayed before, on the small Mediterranean island. A nice hotel would have been far too much of a risk this time. Joe deserves a soft bed and wide windows and ocean views – in moments where he’s feeling more generous to himself, Nicky supposes perhaps they both do – but it would have put them unnecessarily in jeopardy of being noticed.  
  
Copley is supposed to be taking care of this, to be erasing them from security cameras and composing a smokescreen for the events of the past week as the CIA is so disturbingly well-versed in doing. But Nicky wouldn’t trust the man further than he could pick him up and toss him, so this time they’re in lodgings just outside Valletta that if Nicky had to guess, he would assume exist primarily to facilitate the exchange of narcotics and rendezvous with sex workers. He takes no issue morally with either, but it does make for rather gloomy surroundings.  
  
Joe is standing next to the bed, frowning down at the bag he’d set on it as if he’s hoping the green duffel will provide him with answers.  
  
“Why not?” Nicky asks.  
  
“What about Andy?” Joe says, without looking up.  
  
“Nile is more than capable of protecting Andy,” Nicky says, not having to really remind Joe of what they’d both witnessed during their escape. The way their newest family member had protected all of them, throwing herself without consideration of consequence in front of Andy so the bullets would be stopped in Nile’s flesh instead.  
  
Joe doesn’t answer. He does finally meet Nicky’s eyes, though, with storm-cloud shadows in his own. He looks exhausted, worn down in a way Nicky hasn’t seen in a long, long time – if ever. It has something thick and painful gathering in his chest, making swallowing a difficult task. Joe should never look like he does just now. The kindest, gentlest, most beautiful man Nicky has ever known should only exist in easy smiles and laugh-lines and the luscious kiss of pink sunsets.  
  
Nicky crosses over to him. He takes both Joe’s hands in his, bringing them to his mouth and pressing kisses to his knuckles. How well he knows these hands. How often they’ve touched him, caressed him, protected him, held him close. “We are already here. Andy promised to call the moment they arrive at the safehouse.”  
  
“We weren’t safe at the last one. They found us, they …” Joe doesn’t complete the sentence, but he doesn’t need to. Nicky was there. He knows what they did.  
  
“Do you want to go?” he asks. He thinks they need this; being here, together. Some time and some space to find each other again. Joe’s arms are his home and Nicky needs that returned to him more than he needs air to breathe, but he won’t insist. Joe has been unusually quiet, almost despondent, since they left Booker on the banks of the Thames. It scares Nicky. He’ll give Joe what he needs, if it’s something other than being here.  
  
Joe swallows, and the click in his throat is loud in the quiet room. He drops Nicky’s hands, but instead slides his arms around Nicky’s shoulders. Gratefully, Nicky leans against him, tucking his face in against the soft pillow of Joe’s beard. He smells like soap and the botanical oils he rubs into his dry hair to keep it healthy.  
  
“No,” Joe says quietly. “You’re right. We’re already here.”  
  
Nicky suggests a walk, because he thinks if they sit here in a dark room together any longer one of them might snap and start shouting. The last thing he wants in the world is to fight.  
  
They haven’t spoken of it. They’ve barely spoken of anything since parting ways with their family. That scares Nicky, too. They’ve known each other far too long to be surprised anymore by nearly anything, they’ve seen and done it all a hundred times over. Nicky knows his love in anger, in sadness, in lasting depression, in terror that wraps around their hearts and lingers far longer than the danger that caused it. This, however, is brand new. Not close calls, not temporary capture, not having to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the threat of losing each other. Those things are, sadly, familiar. But it’s never before been caused by someone they trusted. Someone they loved. Someone they considered family. Someone they _love_.  
  
He takes Joe’s hand as they wander ancient cobblestones under a dazzling blue sky. The last time they were here, over a century ago, they would not have dared touch each other this way in public. They aren’t immune to sideways glances this time either, but Nicky does not have it in him to care about the judgements of strangers. He holds Joe’s hand tighter and stands closer in defiance.  
  
“It’s all the same, but … so different,” Joe remarks.  
  
Nicky feels it, too. The stone walls and buildings in some ways seem unchanged over the ages, as if being here could transport them right back to the 17th century. To a time before electric lights, before cameras, before automatic weapons. To strolling down this very street, only in linen trousers instead of denim, soft leather loafers instead of sneakers, with a handkerchief in his pocket instead of a cellphone. At the same time everything has changed. Cars line the streets, shops that used to sell spices or tobacco or animal-felt hats now advertise laptop computers and cheap souvenirs.  
  
“It is,” Nicky agrees. Joe means more than just the city, maybe, and Nicky feels the weight of that sinking into his gut, but this isn’t the place to discuss it. He brings Joe’s hand to his mouth to press his lips to the back of his palm.  
  
Joe lets his hand go and wraps his arm around Nicky’s shoulders instead, pulling him in close. Nicky hugs around his waist and stays pressed against him as they walk.  
  
“What do you want to eat?” Nicky asks.  
  
Joe only shrugs.  
  
The weight in Nicky’s gut turns to something with sharp edges. He swallows and tries to put it out of his mind.  
  
* * *  
  
The view from their cramped balcony, decorated with two folding chairs and a chipped pot of dirt that must have once held a plant but now is home only to dry soil, feels almost like an insult to the beauty of this island. The pavement below is cracked and dirty. It must be mere decades old, concrete poured over the stones, if the road existed before. It may not have. Anything new in this ancient place feels so much like it doesn’t belong here. Across the street is another inn, nearly identical to the one they’re staying in only painted blue instead of yellow. If they were in America, Joe knows it would be called a _motel_. Whether there is an equivalent term here, he isn’t sure. He speaks too many languages. Sometimes even after all these centuries they still get muddled up in his head. Nicky’s, too. They’re both far, far too old. Joe has never felt it more than he does right now.  
  
The metal railing is hot from the sun on the underside of his forearms as he rests on it, letting it take some of his weight. There are spectacular views in this city. Of the harbor, of the ocean, of the old square. Joe’s seen them all, from dozens of different windows, over the centuries. Their current location, dingy and depressing as it may be, does at least seem to fit the moment better than other places they’ve stayed. Joe’s not sure he would be able to enjoy the sun setting over the ocean, anyway. Better to leave those rooms to people who don’t feel the way he feels today.  
  
He can hear Nicky moving around inside. Joe has been so thoroughly torn in two. Half of his heart wants to rush in and drag Nicky into his arms, kiss him until neither of them can breathe, whisper to him until they feel safe and whole again, find salvation in him like they have since long before Joe lost the ability to properly gauge the passing of time. His other half, the half that seems to so far be winning the battle, can’t bear to even look at Nicky for too long. He can’t see Nicky’s eyes, normally wide and beautiful and the color of sea-glass, without recalling them screwed up in pain. He can’t see Nicky’s skin without remembering it sliced into, pieces extracted, the stain of blood that lingered. He can’t see Nicky’s hair without remembering it caked in blood, too.  
  
It’s as if the man he loves is wrapped in a cloak made of ghosts, that only Joe can see, but can see them so clearly that he can’t ignore them. One blink and Joe’s back in a nightmare. In the adrenaline rush of danger and the inertia of escape, Joe had successfully tabled the worst of it. There had been things to do. Booker’s betrayal to deal with. Andy’s wounds, Nile’s constant questions that deserved thoughtful answers. Copley. Getting out of England. With tasks before him, an autopilot type of calm had propelled Joe forward. It wasn’t until they arrived, and he finally stopped, that it all caught up.  
  
Now he’s here, and it’s as if he’s drowning, and his Nicolo should be a life-raft but he can’t be, because he’s a walking reminder of all the ways Joe has failed. Of how easy it would have been, to have lost him forever. How precarious their lives have always, always been. Immortality is an illusion. The vows they’ve made to each other are so easily broken.  
  
“Oh! Merda,” Nicky cries out sharply, from inside the room.  
  
Joe blinks. For a moment, the cloudy windows on the building across the road swim in his blurry vision, and his brain, sluggish or maybe trying to shield him from it all, takes too long to understand what his ears have heard. Then it shatters, bright and violent and all at once, and Joe’s heart leaps into his throat.  
  
He’s running before he realizes it, tearing through the small room and shoving into the bathroom door so hard it nearly flies off its hinges. It slams loudly into the opposite wall and bounces back off.  
  
Nicky jumps and backs up a few steps on instinct, his eyes massive and panicked for just a second before he sees Joe on the other side instead of an attack. “What?” he cries.  
  
“What did – you – ” Joe’s heart races so wildly it makes him dizzy, as he takes in the otherwise empty bathroom and notices Nicky is holding a tissue to a spot on his cheek. “You’re not …?”  
  
“Not what?” Nicky asks. “What’s happened?”  
  
There’s a razor in his other hand. And a cannister of shaving cream on the counter, and a dampened cloth next to it. Joe stares at them, working out far, far too slowly in his frantic mind what made Nicky cry out.  
  
“Oh,” Nicky says, seeing what Joe is staring manically at. “Oh, no it’s just small. I’m fine.”  
  
He holds the tissue out, clearly thinking that will make it better, but there’s blood on it, and on Nicky’s cheek, and Joe’s stomach turns. He wants to cry, to bend over and scream at the top of his lungs into his hands. His heart won’t stop, it’s still beating like a hammer against his ribcage, every inch of his skin buzzing like ants are consuming his flesh.  
  
“You have to be more careful!” he says. Shouts it, really. It isn’t what he should say. It isn’t what he _meant_ to say, but it’s what comes tumbling furiously out of his mouth.  
  
Nicky is staring at him with his forehead twisted into a frown, confusion on his face, and something else, too. His voice is wounded and defensive, as he says, “it’s nothing, Joe. Look, it’s healing already.”  
  
“That isn’t the fucking point!” Joe rages.  
  
He sees the moment Nicky’s expression shifts. The way his eyes flash, ice and anger within them, and the defiant jut of his chin that accompanies the challenge he issues. “What is the point, then?”  
  
Joe bristles. “Never mind.”  
  
“No, tell me. You burst in here like a lunatic and shout at me for cutting myself shaving, if it isn’t about that, then what? You have my attention.”  
  
He’s been leaving space for Joe, silently hovering nearby but not pushing. This is a set-up. A pit dug specifically for Joe to fall into. And Joe can’t. He just fucking can’t. He leaves instead, and Nicky doesn’t stop him.  
  
* * *  
  
There is a beach not far from where they’re staying. They’d found it centuries before. Back then, it was always deserted, because its only point of access was by climbing down a treacherous rockface and most people wouldn’t risk the injury. Joe and Nicky didn’t need to care. They were brave enough to be unafraid of the descent and skilled enough not to fall, and it wouldn’t have mattered much if they had. A broken ankle or badly scraped arm, for them, would sting for a minute or two and then melt away into nothingness as if it had never happened.  
  
It’s where Nicky finds Joe, nearly an hour after he’d run away from their room as if it had just burst into flames. He’s sitting in the sand with his knees tucked up against his chest, near the water but not so near as to be in the pathway of the slowly rolling lapping on the shore. The sun is going down over the distant horizon and it backlights Joe, casting him in shadows, turning his curls into a halo around his head. Nicky hesitates for only a moment, lingering back by the rocks to see if Joe will turn to look.  
  
He’s been vaguely queasy for days, in a way that isn’t so insistent as to demand his attention but also isn’t so faint that he can ever fully ignore it. That churning in his stomach is worse, just now, gazing at the back of the man he loves more than life itself. It isn’t that they’ve never fought. They’ve known each other for exactly 921 years, they would have to be robots to have gone that long and never had a misunderstanding, or gotten on each other’s nerves, or overreacted to something small and felt guilty about it later. But Nicky’s not sure Joe has ever looked at him the way he did earlier. There was so much more than anger or annoyance in it. There was _fear_.  
  
Joe still doesn’t move an inch as Nicky approaches him, although he must know he isn’t alone and he must know the company he keeps, because he wouldn’t stay motionless in the sand and let a stranger walk up on him from behind. Nicky lowers himself down and sits next to him, folding his legs in and his hands in his lap, staring with Joe out over the water.  
  
“I’m sorry,” Joe says quietly after a long stretch of silence, punctured only by the shrill cry of gulls above them.  
  
“It’s alright.” Nicky reaches for his hand and brings it up so that Joe’s fingertips can slide along his cheek, over the spot where a small nick from the razor might as well have never been. He knows it isn’t about the cut. They both do. He just longs for them to be alright, and he’s terrified they aren’t. He’s terrified this one, this brush with death, was so much worse than all the others, and might have sunk into their bones in a way that won’t be so easy to clear out.  
  
Joe’s eyes shine in the low light, and he seems only to be able to hold Nicky’s gaze for a second before he looks away like it’s scalded him. Nicky swallows over a painful lump that rises in his throat and tries desperately not to take that personally. It isn’t as easy as he’d like, and he’s not sure he manages it at all.  
  
“You are the most beautiful like this,” he murmurs, to cover for the way it all burns in his chest. He shifts in closer, grateful beyond words when Joe lets Nicky wrap an arm around him and tip him over so they’re leaning against each other. Nicky kisses his forehead, and leaves his lips resting there. “The sunlight kissing your skin. Making you golden.”  
  
Joe says nothing else, but his warm hand curls around the side of Nicky’s neck and Nicky doesn’t miss the way his thumb reaches up to brush once again over the spot where the blood had been.  
  
Later when they climb into bed together and Joe folds himself against Nicky’s back, Nicky also doesn’t miss the way Joe’s hand moves until it’s pressing flat in the center of Nicky’s chest so it’s just over his beating heart. He shifts backwards, moving in just an inch closer, and threads their fingers together with his wrist on Joe’s so he can feel Nicky’s pulse on both sides of his hand. Joe’s lips press just briefly into the nape of Nicky’s neck, and because Joe hasn’t kissed any part of him in days, it feels much more enormous than it is.  
  
Hours later, Nicky is woken by a soft whimper from the other side of the bed. Joe is on his back with his eyes still closed, but he’s twitching.  
  
It’s nearly always the same nightmare. Nicky knows that because they so rarely keep things from each other. Joe dreams it’s Nicky in the iron maiden at the bottom of the sea, and Joe is the one tearing down the world to find him and never succeeding, his heart hardening as Andy’s has while Nicky drowns and drowns and drowns and slowly goes mad so that even if they did manage to find him, Nicky wouldn’t be the same as he was and Joe would never truly get him back. This time, Nicky would wager, he was strapped to a medical gurney instead, before he was thrown to the waves.  
  
Joe startles awake with a gasp. Nicky feels the bed shake with it. And Joe always reaches for him after that dream. If they’ve drifted apart in sleep as they have now, his hands always cross over to Nicky’s side of the bed, finding him, moving in close to him so Nicky can hold him and promise they’re both safe and soothe him back to sleep. This time he doesn’t. Joe turns the other way instead, curling in on himself.  
  
Nicky swallows, and stares up into the darkness, and tries not to feel every inch of it breaking his heart.  
  
* * *


	2. Thunder

The burner phone they’d picked up stays hauntingly silent for three full days. Three days of it resting as a taunting weight in Joe’s pocket when it’s his turn to carry it, and when it’s Nicky’s or when it sits plugged in on the bedside table at night, it exists only marginally further from his mind but never completely off it.  
  
He’s torn on this, too. A logical corner of his mind knows Andy can take care of herself, and Nile is there, and that Andy would have absolutely none of it if Joe attempted to helicopter over her and track her every move from here on out. A more emotional, much larger part of him can’t forget that they’re going to lose her. That has always been true but it used to be abstract, far off, something that would come to pass _eventually_ but that they didn’t need to expend energy worrying about. Now it’s in their faces, blaring like unwelcome midnight music.  
  
And Joe still isn’t convinced he and Nicky should even be here. It was supposed to help. It was supposed to lighten the invisible pressure in Joe’s chest, to be alone with the man in loves back in the place where they’ve known such happiness. It isn’t working. They’re under the same roof but they’ve never been so far apart.  
  
The phone makes Joe jump when it suddenly starts ringing and vibrating far more obnoxiously against the desk in the corner than necessary to get anyone’s attention. After the initial jolt to his heart, he jumps up for another reason – it couldn’t be anyone calling other than Andy or Nile. They’d given the number to no one else, not even Copley. Joe had wondered, just for a brief moment, if they should have found a way to give it to Booker as well, just in case of emergencies, but then had realized they’ll likely toss it and have a new one by next week anyway. And in a dark part of his mind that he’s not particularly proud of, he didn’t want Booker to be able to contact them. They’re right to be angry with him. Booker has sad eyes and Nicky has a kind heart and Joe has no interest in letting him be manipulated.  
  
He lunges for the phone and answers it breathlessly, and the response has relief washing over him.  
  
“Aww, you weren’t worried about me, were you?” Andy asks. Her voice crackles over the line. The reception must be weak but it’s her, and a clamp Joe hadn’t realized was squeezing around his heart suddenly slackens.  
  
“Of course I fucking was,” he answers, no bones about it, or whatever that expression is. “Are you okay? How’s Nile?”  
  
“We’re fine, we’re at the safehouse,” Andy assures. “No sign anyone else has been here since the last time I was.”  
  
“Good.”  
  
“You guys? No trouble so far?”  
  
For just a second Joe hesitates, before common sense catches up with him and he realizes she’s asking about their passage from London to Malta, not about their current emotional states. “Oh, yeah, we’re … fine, we’re good. No problems.”  
  
Andy pauses, and there are noises in the back that don’t sound like fuzz from a bad connection. It sounds like she’s moving. “Wanna talk about it?”  
  
“About what?”  
  
“Yusuf,” she says heavily, and in flawless Italian, continues, “you remember I’ve known you almost nine centuries? You think I can’t hear it in your voice?”  
  
Joe drags his tongue slowly over his lips and closes his eyes for a beat. He doesn’t have that advantage like her, of being able to speak a language his current roommate doesn’t understand. Of all Joe’s various dialects, Nicky’s the weakest in Persian, but he understands enough to know exactly what they were talking about, were he standing here next to Joe instead of out on the balcony with the glass door closed.  
  
But Joe can’t. It all rises up like bile in his throat every time he’s tried. It’s not like him at all. They never keep important things from each other. Barriers between him and Nicky have always been nonexistent, but between the rest of them, too. It would never have worked, the things they all do together, if they’d kept secrets. Or so Joe thought. Until they found out Booker was keeping so many.  
  
“We’re getting through it,” is all he offers her, after far too long of a pause for it to be remotely convincing.  
  
“Joey,” she sighs, but it’s sympathetic, not frustrated, and that’s worse.  
  
“We’ll come meet you as soon as we can, alright?” His voice doesn’t sound like his own. Pinched and higher pitched than usual, and the words grate on their way out of his throat as if he’s ill – which of course he hasn’t been, in almost a millennium.  
  
“You know that’s not what I care about. I don’t wanna see either of your asses around here until you’ve worked all that shit out,” Andy says, in English this time. She’s either moved far enough away from Nile so she won’t be overheard, or she’s decided she doesn’t care if she is. Joe doesn’t know if he would care either, but then, he doesn’t know what to think about anything, anymore. And when he tries to talk about it, his windpipe closes.  
  
“Yeah.” Joe swallows thickly over his cut-glass throat.  
  
“I … I know, alright?”  
  
Joe’s eyes close again and his exhale trembles. “I know you do.”  
  
Nobody knows like Andy does. Nobody knows what it’s like to be so helpless, to try to protect somebody and fail, to be faced with someone they love with their whole heart being ripped from them. She understands better than anyone in history, alive or not, could understand the violent ache in Joe’s chest, the clouds that coat his every heartbeat, the way it feels like maybe he’ll never be able to breathe properly ever again. And maybe that should make this all easier to bear, but it doesn’t.  
  
“Was he right? Booker?” Joe asks. It’s been tormenting him, their brother’s words in the lab a relentless scratch at the back of his skull.  
  
“About what?”  
  
“What he said about us. Me and Nicky.”  
  
Andy is quiet for a moment before she answers, and a deep exhale sends static across the line that makes the hairs on the back of Joe’s neck stand up. “He was right that you don’t know what it’s like to be alone,” she says eventually, “that doesn’t mean you ever did anything wrong.”  
  
Joe clenches his jaw, teeth squeezing together, for a few seconds before he can speak again. “Did we make it harder for you? Did we rub your faces in it, that we had someone and you didn’t?”  
  
“ _No_. No fucking way.” Andy’s voice switches instantly from tired and resigned to loud and fierce, like it means everything to her suddenly that Joe stops thinking what he’s been thinking. “You two have what you have because you fought like _hell_ for it. You’re still fighting. 900 years of it, in a world that sure as shit should’ve changed by now. The last thing I would’ve ever wanted was for you to hide around us, too.”  
  
“Maybe we should have noticed how much he was hurting.” Joe can’t get rid of that thought, either. Booker wasn’t just one of them by default or cosmic intervention, he was Joe’s _friend_. He was the one Joe followed football with, the one Joe discussed new fashion trends with because his very handsome but very unstylish soulmate couldn’t give a shit about it, the one Joe teased and laughed with the most. Joe should have been first on his list, if Booker needed someone to talk to. The fact that he kept everything to himself, when Joe was _right_ there all this time and would have been at his side in a moment if he'd asked, stings almost more than anything.  
  
“Yeah, we probably should have,” Andy agrees, “and that’s something we’re gonna have to deal with. But you two hiding yourselves away would never have been the solution. Not when you fought so hard to love each other in the first place.”  
  
Joe doesn’t answer. He just struggles to breathe.  
  
“Just. Talk to Nicky, okay? Please,” she says, and it is pleading. Her voice wavers, emotional in a way she almost never is. At least not in this century, or the previous four. “I know how hard it is. You know I fucking do. But I also know what happens if you don’t. I pushed you away when we lost her, both of you. You tried so damn hard to be there and I didn’t let you. Maybe it’s too late for me, maybe too much time has passed, but it’s not too late for you.”  
  
“We’d still be there for you in a fucking second, Boss, you know we would,” Joe swears, his heart breaking for a new reason, as if it needed more cracks in it. As he says it, the sliding door opens and Nicky comes back into the room.  
  
“Andy?” Nicky inquires, eyebrows jumping up hopefully toward his hairline, and Joe nods at him.  
  
“Yeah, I do,” Andy says in his ear, as Nicky hurries over. “And if I know Nicky at all, he’s dying to be there for you right now. And he’s hurting like hell too, so you gotta let him. He loves you, Joe.”  
  
“Thanks,” Joe answers, clenching nearly every muscle in his body in an attempt to keep his voice level and his expression neutral, now that he isn’t alone. “Nicky wants to say hi.”  
  
He hands the phone over before he can catch her answer.  
  
Nicky frowns after him, putting the phone to his ear to greet her, and Joe escapes to the bathroom. He only just manages to shut the door behind himself before there are tears streaming down his face.  
  
* * *  
  
There are memories hovering in nearly every corner of the city. Nicky can see them like they’re haunted spirits floating along the avenues and in the upper windows of old buildings and forming in the mist that comes off the harbor early in the morning. The 13th century, when he’d pulled Joe into an alley behind a cathedral and kissed him just to enjoy the reckless thrill of it, the risk of getting caught and thumbing his nose at the God he’d abandoned. The 16th century, when they’d waded out into the ocean from a public beach that still exists. The 19th, when they’d sat near a fountain in the square and listened to minstrel music and Joe had draped a paper map over their laps so he could hold Nicky’s hand underneath it without being seen. Their history is palpable, in a city as old as this one, and they can’t stroll along the cobblestones or eat in restaurants or sit in the square at night under the stars without being followed around by the shadows of their former selves.  
  
They don’t talk about it. They don’t really talk about much of anything. But Nicky feels it, and he knows Joe does too.  
  
He remembers too clearly how it was when they lost Quynh. How Andy couldn’t speak for weeks, not only about Quynh but about anything at all, for so long that her voice was rusty and broken when it finally returned like a rockface overgrown with moss. How Joe had wept; loud, ragged, tragic sobs with his tears soaking Nicky’s tunic and his body shaking in Nicky’s arms. Nicky himself had been hardened by it, had tortured himself over how comfortable he’d become in their immortality; taking risks, laughing recklessly in the face of danger, so far detached from the reality of Lykon because it had been centuries since Andy had told them that story and because Nicky never met the man so he never felt it in the same way. He’d allowed their loss to darken his heart, to make him sharper and fiercer and irrationally protective of Joe. He’s not sure he ever let go of that. He’s not sure he’s the same, even now, as he was before they lost her.  
  
He feels it happening again, and he’s helpless to stop it. It’s been five days since they arrived, and Joe still hasn’t kissed him.  
  
In the shower on a rainy evening, Nicky lets his head tip forward so warm water can cascade over the back of his neck, soothing him even though they aren’t really capable of sore muscles anymore. At least not the kind that last. The steam surrounds him, wrapping him up in humid, pillowy warmth. He rubs soapy hands over himself, wiping away the sweat from a warm day in the sun. The suds wash away in the spray, running down his legs and pooling around his feet before disappearing through the drain.  
  
Red flashes behind his eyes. He remembers so vividly, stepping into a shower stall in a grimy roadside inn after they’d made their escape. Hours later. He’d sat in a car, cramped in the back seat with Booker and Nile, covered in blood and sweat and brain matter. They all did. It was hours before they found a place off the beaten path enough to be safe for them to rest for the night when all of London might have been out searching for them. They’d given Andy the first shower, but Nicky was awarded the second, because he was the filthiest.  
  
It had been too small for two but Joe had stepped in with him anyway. They’d elbowed each other by accident three separate times as they tried to fit into the cramped stall together, eventually finding room for Nicky to stand with his back to the water and Joe facing him. They’d watched as the water ran over Nicky’s body, turning to rust brown as it carried away the remnants of his healed-over injuries. Bits of his skull that had stuck to his matted hair hit the floor and lingered in the drain trap. Joe had stared down at them, as bloody water stained the tile, and reached with trembling hands for Nicky’s hips.  
  
_I’m alright_ , Nicky had told him. He’d cupped Joe’s cheek in his hand, trying to lift his face so their eyes could meet instead, but Joe had resisted. He’d just stared, until the water ran clear. He’d never said a word. Looking back, Nicky thinks maybe that’s the moment something inside Joe shattered. Something that, unlike Nicky’s blown-out skull, hasn’t repaired itself just yet.  
  
He shuts the water off. The last of it pools around his feet and disappears. It’s clean but Nicky swears he can still see blood anyway, even though it isn’t there. A small noise from beyond the shower curtain makes him frown, and he pulls it back to catch the back of Joe as he exits the room. The bathmat is rumpled in a way it hadn’t been when Nicky had stepped into the shower. Joe had been sitting on the floor, he realizes, listening as Nicky washed himself. Then he’d run away, hoping Nicky wouldn’t notice.  
  
Nicky draws the curtain closed again and leans against the wet linoleum wall with his face in his hands.  
  
Joe is out on the balcony when Nicky emerges from the steamy bathroom with a towel around his waist. He wants to go to him. He wants to pull Joe into his arms and hold him close, ask why Joe hadn’t mentioned he was struggling to be alone, promise they can shower together next time if it’s what Joe needs. But he doesn’t.  
  
Nicky lies awake, later, alone in the bed. The lights are off in the room but the television is blaring as Joe flips channels with his big body curled into a ball on the small, tattered sofa. Infomercials, reruns of old sit-coms, and various American news channels flash on the screen as he searches through them – for what, exactly, Nicky doesn’t know. He can’t sleep through the noise but won’t tell Joe to knock it off. He can’t bring himself to. They’re existing on a tightrope, balanced so precariously, and if they got into another argument about something trivial Nicky’s terrified it might really break them.  
  
When Joe finally shuts the television off and gets up, he almost hesitates before he gets into bed. It’s only a moment. If Nicky had timed it, it couldn’t have been longer than three seconds. But it lasts an eternity. An age of Joe standing there, hands fidgeting at his sides, forehead drawn into a frown, hovering at the edge of the mattress like maybe he doesn’t want to crawl in with Nicky, or maybe he’s worried Nicky doesn’t want him to, or maybe, or maybe, until the doubts all pile up and Nicky’s crushed under the weight of them.  
  
And then, Joe moves. He pulls back the blanket and does climb in. The mattress shifts underneath him, bouncing Nicky as Joe settles in next to him. Nicky wants to reach for him. He _aches_ with it, yearns for it, longs like a man lost in the desert dreaming of water to have Joe nestled in his arms. His limbs feel made of lead. Joe takes the decision of out his hands. He goes up onto one elbow and leans over, his head coming to rest in the center of Nicky’s chest, one hand curling around his ribcage.  
  
Nicky exhales, a mountain of tension easing from his body, and wraps his arms around Joe’s shoulders. “Ti amo,” he whispers, craning his neck down to kiss Joe’s hair. “Ti amo, ti amo, ti amo.”  
  
Joe just presses his face down firmer, so that Nicky’s beating heart is right underneath is ear. Nicky knows what he’s doing and it hurts in his soul.  
  
“I’m here. I’m safe. We’re safe,” Nicky says, wrapping a hand around the back of Joe’s neck and squeezing it. He wishes he could will his heartbeat to be louder, so that it could beat like a bass drum, steady and rhythmic, vibrating through Joe’s bones. He wishes Joe could fall asleep to a lullaby composed from the sound of Nicky’s blood rushing in his veins, assuring him that Nicky is alive underneath him.  
  
“How could he do this?” Joe whispers.  
  
Tears burn behind Nicky’s eyes and he blinks to keep them at bay. “I don’t know.”  
  
“He knew it was our greatest fear, being captured, separated. He knew what losing Quynh took from us.”  
  
Nicky wishes he had an explanation.  
  
* * *


	3. Rain

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please be warned there is a sex scene in this chapter begins consensual but if you were extremely sensitive to such triggers, could be read as just a tiny bit dub-con, in that one character stops enjoying himself halfway through and doesn't speak up about it (but the other does notice, and stops it.)

It continues to pour throughout their sixth day on the island.  
  
The sky seems to have opened up and is dropping Joe’s own gloom down on his head. They sit together on the balcony in the morning, protected from the rain by the overhang, drinking coffee silently and listening to the storm. The raindrops pound into the pavement below and thunder rumbles overhead. The sun has risen, theoretically, but the cloud cover is so dense it’s impossible to tell. The view from their balcony is as depressing as ever, made more so by the grey and damp.  
  
Nicky hasn’t spoken yet, today. Joe said _good morning_ to him, but Nicky had only smiled in response. Right now he’s gazing blankly into the space in front of him as if his eyes aren’t really seeing anything from their surroundings. Lost in thought. Sometimes, he’s lovely like that. Sometimes when Nicky gets something stuck in his mind, like when he’s read a particularly profound passage in the latest book he’s devouring, and he’ll just go missing in his own musings and become quiet and unresponsive. Joe loves to look at him, in that state. He always looks so peaceful. But this isn’t that. Whatever thought Nicky is trapped in, it isn’t a good one.  
  
In another situation, or if Joe were a stronger person, he’d go over and kiss him back to life. Wrap his arms around him, whisper to him until Nicky could smile again. Joe isn’t that strong. Maybe he used to be. Maybe it’s his own fault that he isn’t, his own failings. And maybe he’ll never be again. Maybe this is their always, now.  
  
“Do you want more coffee?” he asks, finally, because he can’t take the silence anymore. The percussion of the raindrops on their hollow metal railing feels like Chinese water torture, and endless tapping on the inside of Joe’s skull.  
  
It’s a moment before Nicky seems to register that Joe spoke. He blinks as he looks up, surprised to find Joe standing next to him with his hand held out. “Oh,” he says quietly. “Please.”  
  
He holds his mug out and Joe takes it.  
  
There’s a leak inside their room. Nicky had retrieved a plastic bucket meant for ice last night and placed it on top of a towel in the corner to catch the water falling down from a soggy ceiling panel. It is also a steady, monotonous drip, and Joe has to clench his molars together to keep from kicking it over just to make it stop. It would soak through the carpet and damage the floor underneath it but at least it would be silent.  
  
The sight of the rumpled bedsheets across the room mocks him just as much as the rain and the leak, as Joe’s eyes settle on them. Evidence of where they’d slept tangled together, his head on Nicky’s chest, feeling his steady heartbeat. Evidence of the fact that they hadn’t slept like that since they’ve been here, until the night before. Evidence, as loud and unavoidable as the claps of thunder overhead, that Joe has neglected the one he loves.  
  
_He’s hurting too_ , Andy had said. Of course she’s right, and of course Joe knew that, but he’s been so handcuffed by the hurricane in his own mind. It’s felt like he can’t walk or blink or _breathe_ without thinking of Nicky in pain, without remembering the fear and the desperation and the utter, crushing helplessness. They could have been held prisoner for years if Nile hadn’t come back for them. Maybe decades. Maybe forever. Even now that they’re free the thought of it still has Joe’s breath coming in short gasps and he has to steady himself for a moment with a firm grip on the back of a wooden chair.  
  
When he returns to the balcony, Nicky has crossed his legs and has folded his long-fingered hands in his lap. He’s staring intently at them and doesn’t look up as Joe approaches.  
  
He does sense him, though, and takes the refilled mug from him without looking up. “Thank you,” he says.  
  
Joe’s shoulders tremble as he breathes. He sets his own mug down on the rickety patio table and slides his hand over Nicky’s shoulder, holding it tightly in his grip. Nicky looks up at him, and all the dramatic, poetic misery of the storm seems reflected in his clear eyes.  
  
Before he can overthink it, Joe dips down to kiss him. It’s only a soft, brief brush of his lips – or, he only intends it to be, but Nicky whimpers underneath him and suddenly his hands are grabbing for Joe’s shirt, holding fistfuls of it and not letting Joe move away. His mouth opens to Joe’s, lips a hungry slide, a tongue coming out to taste just for a moment.  
  
Joe is frozen in time, trapped in the war his mind has been waging, for only a second. And then he realizes. Like a crack of lightening he realizes they haven’t. Not one kiss, not the entire time they’ve been here. And not in the days they spent in London, dealing with Booker and Copley. Joe’s not sure they’ve ever, in 920 years, spent a this much time together without kissing each other. Not since the very first time.  
  
His knees wobble and give out on him, and he falls to them on the damp tiles. Nicky’s coffee spills over his pants and the mug clatters to the ground and Nicky barely reacts to it. They’re very used to pain. He only grips his handfuls of Joe’s shirt that much tighter like he’s afraid if he doesn’t, Joe will move away. The thought of it breaks Joe’s heart.  
  
He holds Nicky’s face in his hands, warm cheeks under his fingertips, and tilts their foreheads to rest together. “I haven’t kissed you,” he whispers miserably. It feels like the most awful admission. The most stunning confession of his own failure.  
  
Nicky shakes his head. “Not since the van. When you said all those beautiful things about me.”  
  
“I meant every one,” Joe tells him, because it might scar in a way much deeper than physical to consider why he’s been so distant, when Nicky went through it all as well and is the very last person Joe should have been pushing away.  
  
“I am not so talented with words as you are, but everything you said applies to you, as well. Your kindness, your gentle heart, the way you’re my light in the darkness.”  
  
Joe squeezes his eyes shut tight. “I’m so sorry.”  
  
“I understand. It’s alright, my love.”  
  
It isn’t alright, but Joe doesn’t know how to fix it.  
  
* * *  
  
The rain subsides in the afternoon. The sky turns pink and orange as the clouds part and the sun peeks timidly through them. The streets shine, dazzling where the light reflects off the lingering pools of rainwater. Nicky takes Joe’s hand and gently leads him out into the world, figuring there is a patio overlooking the ocean at sunset with their names on it. There is sangria and kapunata to be enjoyed, and memories to reminisce together, and smiles that crease the edges of their tired eyes. Joe doesn’t resist him, and he lets Nicky hold his hand as they stroll through the remnants of the storm toward the harbor where the sun in shining.  
  
He is so golden in sunlight. Nicky turns pink and would burn if his pale skin were capable of lasting damage, but Joe simply glows as if he’s lit from within. As if the lifeforce of their planet awakens the very soul inside him and has it spilling dazzlingly from his every pore.  
  
Joe laughs with him, when Nicky tries to make him smile with his terrible jokes. It isn’t quite as bright as it might have been weeks ago. They’d been more connected than ever after their year alone together – traveling and adventuring, working a few smaller jobs without Andy, visiting Booker in Paris, spending endless nights loving each other under a canopy of stars – and they don’t have it back, yet. Not quite, or maybe not even close, but it’s something. That haunted look behind Joe’s dark eyes fades, just a little, and if his smiles aren’t as wide and free as they would have been, well, at least he’s smiling at all.  
  
They stroll through busy streets as the sun slips below the horizon. Nicky spots a shop selling pastries, but Joe squeezes the back of his neck and tells him, “generic Maltese won’t be nearly enough to stump Andy,” and he’s right, so they keep moving. No one pays them any attention, and it’s nice to be absorbed into a crowd, anonymous and uninteresting to passers by. It’s new, relatively, for them. To be able to hold hands on a crowded boulevard and be ignored. It took such a long time to get here. Nicky aches when he thinks of parts of the world where they haven’t, yet. Where people like them would not be overlooked.  
  
As the stars begin to emerge in the clear sky, they end up back on their private beach. The sand has mostly dried since the rain stopped, except for a few pools of it that had gathered in low spots. He sits with Joe against the rock cliff, their backs leaned comfortably against a flat part of it and their legs stretched out in front of them. He points to the heavens and identifies constellations, calling them by their ancient names because he still remembers. The stars have always assured him something larger than this world must exist, even if he doesn’t believe in what he once did.  
  
He lies down, after it’s dark, with his head in Joe’s lap. Wordlessly, Joe’s fingers slide into his hair, scratching over his scalp, and Nicky closes his eyes and soaks in the sensation that sends shivers down his spine. They exist in comfortable silence for long enough that Nicky is nearly asleep, when Joe speaks.  
  
“You never saw Jerusalem.”  
  
Nicky frowns and blinks up at him. “Pardon?”  
  
“It meant so much to you, and you never saw it.”  
  
He’s correct, in his assertion. They killed each other outside the city walls. Nicky never made it inside. But Joe’s quiet, flat voice only deepens his frown. It isn’t a new revelation. Nicky doesn’t understand why it’s being brought up, out of nowhere.  
  
“It was your home, and I tried to take it,” Nicky tells him. “I did not deserve to see it.”  
  
“Maybe not then,” Joe concedes. He won’t look at Nicky. He only stares out over the ocean. “But we never went back. Ever.”  
  
“It is meaningless. Joe.” Nicky reaches for him, coaxes Joe to face him. He can’t read the expression on Joe’s face as he looks down and it frightens him, just when he’d thought they were rounding a corner. “I didn’t find what I was looking for, when I invaded your city, but I found what I needed. I found you. An ancient holy land means nothing to me.”  
  
“Would you want to? We could go there now.”  
  
“Now?”  
  
“I don’t mean right this second. I mean in the present.”  
  
Nicky swallows. Joe looks back out at the water so Nicky sits up, rearranging himself so he’s next to Joe again instead. “No,” he says. “I told you, it doesn’t mean anything to me now. It hasn’t for 900 years.”  
  
“Okay.”  
  
“Where did this come from?”  
  
Joe only shrugs. Nicky can’t see his face clearly in the dark, but the way Joe’s shoulders have slumped put a pit back in Nicky’s stomach. It had finally dissipated only hours ago, and it’s back almost as soon as it went.  
  
Nicky takes his hand again. Joe’s skin is cold against his, as he threads their fingers together.  
  
“I miss him,” Joe admits in a whisper.  
  
He exhales, half expecting his breath to turn to clouds in front of his face. It doesn’t, because the cold that overtakes them is internal. Nicky tips over to rest his head on Joe’s shoulder. “So do I.”  
  
Joe’s head tips as well, leaning on Nicky’s. “I don’t regret what we chose. He deserved it, and I can’t trust him anymore. But I miss him.”  
  
Nicky nods and doesn’t need to agree again. He feels it all, too. He squeezes Joe’s hand, and says that they should head back to the hotel before it’s so dark they can’t see well enough to climb back up the cliff. They have slept many nights together between sand and open sky but this doesn’t feel like one of those nights. The space between them feels too fragile for it, like their hard-fought armistice might be blown away on the slightest of breeze.  
  
* * *  
  
_Normal_ , Joe thinks, as he sits on the edge of the mattress in his underwear and watches Nicky brushing his teeth in the small, dingy bathroom. The simplicity of sleeping and waking, filling their bellies, personal hygiene. Things all humans need to survive. Normal things. Things Joe has done with Nicky for nearly a thousand years. It’s changed, over the centuries. Toothpaste is a new invention. Combs are as old as time but look different now than they used to. Access to soap and clean water is not new, but more readily available than it once was. That is a nice development, although there are times when Joe misses the way Nicky smelled before all that. There are times when he takes Nicky sweaty and unwashed into his arms just to breathe him in, just to momentarily transport himself back to a bygone time. To nights they spent in tents on remote hillsides, to shaking hands and fumbling mouths, to learning each other’s hearts and bodies, to the demons Nicky battled in his own mind as he fought to allow himself this new pleasure.  
  
It’s all normal. A cheap hotel room paid for in cash and under fake names is normal. An evening out together in a place they’ve been before, revisiting old haunts and the past version of themselves that still linger there, is normal. Nicky in tight black briefs and no shirt, readying himself for bed in a bathroom with the door open, is normal. But Joe feels as far from the word as he ever has. A dense black cloud still hangs over them, despite the breaking of the storm. Nothing about this feels normal, nothing at all.  
  
He longs for it back. For things to feel like they did, like they always have, instead of like one wrong step could send them tumbling.  
  
Joe stands as Nicky comes out of the bathroom and goes to him in a few quick strides. He takes Nicky’s waist in his arms, bare skin against his own, and drags him into a kiss.  
  
Nicky is still against him only for the space of a heartbeat, and then his arms are flung around Joe’s neck and his lips part, taking Joe’s kiss eagerly. It deepens quickly, tongues sliding together between their parted lips. This, Joe knows. He knows it so intimately, so much better than he knows anything else in this world. Nothing else he has ever known has remained so constant. Everything has changed with the tides around them, and he and Nicky have changed too, but not in the ways that matter. Not this.  
  
He pulls Nicky toward the bed, hands slipping beneath the elastic of his briefs, fingers squeezing in warm flesh. Nicky pushes at them, helping Joe get them off and then his own, so they’re bare by the time they fall together against the sheets. His thigh rubs between Joe’s legs as he rocks into him, kissing him breathless.  
  
“Nicolò,” Joe hears himself rasp. His fingers slide along Nicky’s back, his body a heavy, comforting presence on top of Joe’s.  
  
“Please,” Nicky whispers, into a kiss that tastes like centuries. “I’ve missed you so much.”  
  
“Anything,” Joe promises him. “Everything you want.”  
  
“You, just you. Always just you.”  
  
He’s trembling and Joe wants to hold all the shattered pieces of him together in his hands, to mold Nicky back together with loving fingertips and soft kisses to his forehead.  
  
“I’m so sorry I left you alone.” Joe’s voice wavers around the words, a sob getting caught in his throat as emotion builds up into it and nearly chokes him.  
  
Nicky kisses the corner of his mouth and his hips roll again, the heat and hardness between his legs rubbing into Joe’s and sending shivers down his spine. “I’m not alone. Not when you’re right beside me.”  
  
“But I wasn’t.”  
  
“Enough. You’re here, now. Please?”  
  
Joe can’t deny him anything, and doesn’t want to. He wants it more than he could ever say. Wants _normal_. To feel the love of his life under his hands, feel his warm skin and beating heart, like he always has.  
  
He isn’t as careful as he’d like, as he opens Nicky’s wanting body with slick fingers, because Nicky babbles to him in old Genovese and urges him on with hooded eyes and impatiently rocking hips. He’s always beautiful, like this. Joe wants to consume him, to inhale him, to absorb every inch of him in so they cease to be separate entities. Their souls, he thinks, have always been one. It only seems right that their bodies are no different.  
  
“Please,” Nicky breathes again, over and over until it’s a mantra, a bit of magic chanted like Joe is an ancient spirit to be appeased. “Yusuf, please.”  
  
“Anything,” Joe swears again. He captures Nicky’s mouth in an endless kiss and slides himself inside as he does, finding the home he’s been missing all this time.  
  
Nicky urges him to move the moment he’s sheathed inside all the way, with hands squeezing Joe’s biceps and heels pressing insistent at the small of his back. Joe rolls into him, in slow, sensuous drags that have Nicky moaning so gorgeously before him, but it’s only enough for a minute. Nicky gets impatient and flips them, using his time-honed strength to roll them over so Joe is on his back and Nicky is undulating on top of him, his chin dropping down against his chest and sweaty strands of his hair sticking to his forehead.  
  
He mumbles something unintelligible as he grinds himself down, Joe buried in him to the hilt and rubbing against the spot inside. Then the words are clearer. “Don’t stop,” he moans, pointless because he’s in control now.  
  
Joe, though, only hears _stop_. Flashes of light fill the room. Joe blinks. Are there cameras? No, there couldn’t be. Nicky is still above him and they’re still blissfully alone, bodies connected, Nicky’s hands braced on Joe’s chest as he moves. He isn’t stopping.  
  
He looks at him. A bead of sweat runs down the side of Nicky’s face, changing directions as it passes over his sharp jaw so it can travel down the column of his throat. It’s bright red. Bright red and screaming in neon. Joe screws his eyes closed and shakes his head sharply. When he opens them again, the blood is gone. It was never there.  
  
Joe inhales. His hands find Nicky’s hips, gripping them, helping him move. Focusing on the way it feels, Nicky’s warm body surrounding him, squeezing him, moving rhythmically against him.  
  
Nicky moans again. A soft, wanton noise from deep in his throat. A long needle pressing in between his ribs. The flash again, only it’s not a camera, it’s the overhead lights glinting off the shiny silver blade of a scalpel. Slicing into Nicky’s precious skin, extracting bloody pieces of him. Scarlet runs down from the incisions. Nicky groans, hands clenched and tendons in his neck standing out.  
  
Above him, Nicky’s eyes are closed. His forehead is twisted. Face screwed up, in pain, in agony. Jaw clenched and trembling as he fights to keep it inside, to not cry out, to not worry Joe. As if Joe could lie next to him, strapped to a gurney of his own, blood dripping from his own wounds, and not worry as they carved up the earthly vessel that holds the other half of his soul. As if he could just take it and not scream and thrash and rage, _Stop it, leave him alone! Get the fuck off him_! A taunting laugh curdles his blood. _What are you going to do about it_?  
  
There’s stillness in the room. Joe notices he’s panting as the images fade away, open-mouthed, gasping for each gulp of oxygen he steals into his aching lungs. His eyes open. Nicky is staring down at him, his chest similarly heaving as he struggles to catch his breath. His face isn’t pained. It isn’t something Joe can easily recognize, not with the way his heart is racing so fast it’s making him dizzy. Shocked, maybe. Or devastated.  
  
Nicky moves. Joe slips from his body and then Nicky’s heat and weight are gone. He’s falling to the mattress beside Joe, limbs flopping like they’ve been made boneless.  
  
Joe’s whole body shakes. He brings barely controllable hands up to cover his face, unable to stare anymore at the stained ceiling above him. It’s too familiar, after six days here. Too stark a reminder of where they are, and where they are not.  
  
“Were you ever going to tell me to stop?” Nicky croaks, quiet and miserable.  
  
Joe can’t help the strangled noise that escapes his throat. It comes from a place deep inside him and fights its way out of his body and into the humid room surrounding them.  
  
When he doesn’t answer, Nicky sits up, feet finding the floor, and leaves Joe alone in the bed.  
  
* * *


	4. Lightning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please be aware there is a graphicly-depicted panic attack in this chapter.

Joe has been awake for hours by the time the dawn slowly creeps in through the crack in the curtains, spilling weak lines of yellow sunlight across the worn carpet. It moves quickly, travelling through the minutes toward their bed and up the wall. Nicky is awake next to him, Joe can tell by the slightest difference in his breathing, but they’ve both stayed motionless and unspeaking. Nicky is on his side facing the wall. He should be in Joe’s arms. It wouldn’t feel right just now, and that fact alone is one of the more unsettling things Joe has ever experienced. His entire world feels flipped upside down.  
  
Nicky’s leg is bent back at the knee, though, and the warm side of his foot is touching Joe’s calf. It’s something. It’s not much, a thread so fine it would crumble in the slightest breeze, but it’s something. One of them will have to move first, to break that invisible connection between them, and Joe is determined that it won’t be him, even as his bladder begins to make itself known.  
  
_Have you ever done that before?_ Nicky had asked, after he’d dressed and cleaned up in the bathroom before rejoining Joe in the bed. He’d stared up at the ceiling and continued, _wanted to stop, and not said anything?_  
  
_No_ , Joe had whispered to the darkness surrounding them.  
  
Nicky’s throat had clicked as he swallowed. Joe watched the movement of it.  
  
_Promise?_ Nicky had wanted to know, and Joe had nodded fervently. It was the truth, although he wasn’t sure if Nicky would believe him. He wasn’t sure why Nicky should.  
  
Eventually, Nicky shifts. His foot leaves its place against Joe’s leg and he rolls over onto his back. His silver eyes meet Joe’s, then flit down to his mouth, and then back up. Then they close briefly and open again to stare up at the ceiling, his face in profile as his head straightens on the pillow.  
  
Joe wants to reach for him. Kiss him and touch him, beg for forgiveness, beg for help, beg for things to be reset to two weeks ago when they were so happy. He has always been the one who’s easier to break. Always the more outwardly emotional. Joe’s upsets have always run hot, bursting like sunspots but then fading, able to joke and tease and carry on. Nicky’s burn cold like water freezing into ice. Nicky spools all his hurt inside and tries for the millionth time to become a more effective force for good in the world, even if his eyes aren’t quite as bright as before.  
  
It isn’t surprising, the way he’s locked it all away. Nicky has always stowed his own emotions to make room for everyone else’s. He’s always taken care of them, all of them, put everyone before himself. But it hurts to see. And Joe’s anguish isn’t fading fast like it normally would. It’s lingering.  
  
Nicky gets up first. He heads to the bathroom and after a moment Joe hears the shower running. He crawls out of the bed and follows him again like he had before. Nicky had left the door ajar so instead of entering, Joe leans against the wall and sinks to the floor just outside it. He listens, with his head tipped back and his eyes closed, to the change in the sound of the water on the tile floor as Nicky steps into the stall and moves around. It’s louder when he isn’t directly under the spray, running shampoo through his hair or soap over his body, and quieter when he’s rinsing off. Joe knows him so well. He knows the pattern in which Nicky has always cleansed himself. Left arm first, then right. Left leg, right leg. Stomach. Back. Feet. He can picture it so clearly, listening to Nicky move.  
  
Then, the movement stops. The splatter of the water evens out, steadying, indicating stillness. Nicky isn’t turning it off or getting out, though. Joe’s eyes open when a tiny, broken whimper reaches his ears. Followed by another, and another. The sound of the love of his life, the other half of his very soul, crying. Alone in a shower stall, the spray cascading down over him, hoping it will cover the sound of his heartache, but it doesn’t. Not quite.  
  
Joe’s eyes fill with tears and he clasps a hand over his mouth to stifle the sob that threatens to slip from his own throat. He was wrong, it’s so much worse to hear Nicky letting it out than it was watching him keeping it inside. It’s all Joe’s fault. He should be leaping up and running in there and dragging a soaked, unhappy Nicky into his arms. He should be stroking his wet hair and holding him until the tears slow. Instead he feels glued to the floor. Instead he isn’t strong enough to carry his own pain and Nicky’s too.  
  
The water does shut off, eventually. The metal rings of the shower curtain screech as they slide along the rod and Nicky moves around in the bathroom, drying off and dressing and running the tap a few times. Joe doesn’t move an inch. He can’t. He’s still there on the carpet beside the door when Nicky emerges, and Nicky falters immediately, knowing he’s been caught. He hovers over Joe for a moment and then he moves to the unmade bed and sits on the edge of the mattress. He rubs a hand across his mouth and leans over, elbows resting on his knees, looking to the floor. His eyes are still red and swollen from the tears he’d tried and failed to hide.  
  
The silence that echoes between them is as loud as canon-fire.  
  
“What do we do?” Joe asks, helplessly. It isn’t fair at all, to ask Nicky to have any answers, but Joe is out on a ledge with no way to climb back off it.  
  
Nicky threads his fingers together and squeezes them until the skin is devoid of color. “I wish I knew.”  
  
They head out for the morning. They have no need to, but Joe can’t stomach the idea of sitting around a dank, dimly lit hotel room, avoiding each other’s gaze and thinking about all the things they aren’t talking about. It’s only marginally better to be sad in the sunshine, but better nonetheless. They find a small café near the water and for a few brief moments espresso and pastries occupy their attention, until Nicky’s hand twitches on the table like he was about to reach for Joe’s but then changes his mind and folds them in his lap, and it’s all Joe can do to keep from bursting into tears right there on a crowded patio.  
  
His Nicky is the kindest, gentlest, most caring person Joe has ever known. If he’s broken that golden heart and stolen the light behind his silver eyes, Joe will never forgive himself.  
  
His reflection barely looks like his own, when he stares at it later in the yellowing mirror in their bathroom. He’s been alive so long. His appearance has changed so many times, with evolving fashions, with a thicker beard in times spent on the run and away from modern convenience, with trends in hairstyles that come and go. They’ve always, all of them, altered themselves to fit in as the world moves around them but his underlying architecture has always been the same. Now, as he takes himself in, his cheeks seem hollowed, his skin duller, his eyes tired. He looks as if he’s been ill for a month, not simply upset for a few days. Their bodies regenerate so easily. Joe doesn’t have a single new wrinkle, or freckle, or thinning patch of hair, since the day Nicky’s sword first plunged into him. They don’t change in that way, but it seems like he has. Their abilities, it seems, do not extend to the damage left by emotional wounds.  
  
He heads back into the main room, expecting Nicky to still be on the couch with a magazine where he’d been sitting when Joe got up to use the toilet. He isn’t. It takes his mine a moment to register that he’s gone, but once it does, everything slows down like a cosmic switch has been flipped.  
  
He isn’t there. The magazine is, still sitting, open, on the coffee table. The TV remote sits next to it, a quiet commercial for kitchen appliances playing as background audio to Joe’s wildly calculating mind. Nothing else is out of place. Nothing’s been disturbed, or knocked over, or broken. He heard nothing, in the bathroom. He’d flushed the toilet and run the water but neither of those things would have been loud enough to mask the sound of a fight or of Nicky calling out for him.  
  
For a moment, Joe can’t breathe. His lungs constrict, his chest burns. Then he gasps, inhaling sharply and painfully as if he’d been half drowned and is bursting up above the surface of the water. It slides down his esophagus like shards of glass. He chokes on it. Again and again he tries to suck in a proper breath but they don’t work. The room is devoid of oxygen, spinning around him.  
  
His knees hit the carpet. It’s rough under his hands. His fingers grasp at it as he chokes. Like Quynh, under the sea all these centuries, gasping for air that doesn’t exist, lungs filling, collapsing, dying, only to wake again. Like their captured sister he’s alone, lungs screaming for a breath of air that will never, ever come.  
  
“Joe.”  
  
His heart races like the pounding of horses’ hooves, a relentless drumming along his skin, thundering in each finger and toe. He can’t see, only blurry shadows of his own hands in front of his face, fingertips skating along the rug. A heart attack, maybe a stroke, a medical emergency he won’t die from, unless he does. Unless this is it, the moment he leaves this world, leaves Nicky, except Nicky is gone anyway and maybe wouldn’t even notice.  
  
“Yusuf!”  
  
He’s being shaken. Hands gripping his shoulders, squeezing, rattling him around inside his own bones. His brain bounces violently off the walls of his skull and it hurts but it knocks something loose, and he can see again, even if he still can’t breathe.  
  
There is a man kneeling before him, the one shaking him, with wide, terrified eyes and parted lips and reddened cheeks. He comes into focus as Joe blinks. Nicky.  
  
“You …” he whispers, shoulders still heaving as he struggles to breathe.  
  
“What’s happening?” Nicky cries. He’s scared, so scared, and Joe wants to reassure him, promise that he loves him, tell him how sorry he is that their last moments together are like this instead of gentle and loving like Nicky deserves.  
  
“I can’t breathe,” Joe says. He repeats it, hears himself say it over again as Nicky’s hands wander. Checking him over, feeling his forehead and his neck and his chest, finding his speeding pulse, pulling his shirt up to look for blood.  
  
“You’re not …” he starts, but doesn’t finish the thought. Instead he moves in closer and his hands cup Joe’s face, bringing it up so their eyes can meet.  
  
When Joe closes his, unable to bear the fear on Nicky’s face, his cheek is slapped. The sting of it bursts on his skin.  
  
“Hey!” Nicky snaps. “Look at me. Stay with me. You’re not hurt. It’s panic, Joe, you’re not dying. I need you to keep looking at me, keep trying to breathe.”  
  
Joe shakes his head, and Nicky’s fingers soften on his face, the backs of his knuckles stroking Joe’s cheeks instead.  
  
“That’s it,” Nicky murmurs, taking a noisy, deep breath himself and urging Joe to mimic him. “That’s it, you’re alright. Breathe with me. I’m here. Right here. I’ve got you.”  
  
Joe tries. He watches Nicky’s shoulders rise and fall, struggles to match the speed of it. For the way it feels, tearing his insides apart, it might be a week before the terror loosens its icy-fingered grip around his windpipe, but slowly it does. Slowly the room around them comes back into focus. Slowly inhaling no longer feels like the air is made of gravel. Slowly his pulse decelerates. Nicky keeps talking to him, half in English and half in Italian, and keeps stroking his face. Whispering things to him that Joe’s head won’t make sense of but his body seems to understand, like a wild animal soothed by the sound of a soft voice despite not knowing the meaning behind the words.  
  
“There you go.” Nicky’s hand cups around the side of Joe’s neck, and the other pets over his hair. “Keep breathing.”  
  
“Nicky,” Joe whimpers, reaching for him. His hands find Nicky’s t-shirt and he squeezes handfuls of it.  
  
“I’m here,” Nicky says again. “You’re alright.”  
  
Joe shudders.  
  
“Yusuf, what happened?” Nicky asks gently, when Joe is breathing steadily and the world has stopped spinning.  
  
“I came out and you were gone.”  
  
“I wasn’t gone. I was on the balcony.”  
  
Joe feels so foolish. He’d never thought Nicky might be out there, only in the corner of it where the curtains would have blocked him from view. “I couldn’t see you. I thought you’d been taken again, or …”  
  
“Or what?”  
  
He swallows and sadness overtakes him. It’s something he hasn’t wanted to admit to thinking, even to himself. The thought has been pestering him for days and he’s shoved it away again and again, only for it to return louder than before. “Or you’d left.”  
  
“Why would I leave?” Nicky’s voice trembles and Joe can’t look at him. He closes his eyes as tears spill from them and run down his burning cheeks.  
  
“Maybe I’ve been unbearable to live with this past week. Maybe you’d had enough.” Joe sniffs and his chest aches again, in heartbreak this time.  
  
“Come,” Nicky says, nudging him. “Let’s get off the floor.”  
  
Lacking the strength to resist, Joe lets himself be pulled to his feet and led to the couch. Nicky pushes lightly, urging Joe to sit and then crawling into his lap. His weight settles on Joe’s thighs, knees pressed to either side of Joe’s hips, and Joe clings to him unabashedly. His arms go around Nicky’s back, his forehead pressed against Nicky’s so the air between their lips is moist and shared.  
  
Nicky’s hands cradle the back of Joe’s neck, and he curls into him, making himself small in Joe’s arms. “You, beautiful man, are my whole entire heart. The other half of my very soul. There is no me without you. I would never, ever leave you because we’ve had a difficult week. One week is … in the span of our life together? Joe, it’s a drop in an ocean. It’s nothing.”  
  
His words should be calming, reassuring, but all Joe can think is that losing Quynh felt like this. White hot and ice cold pain, crashing over him in heart-stopping waves.  
  
“When I was shot?” Nicky asks, with his face tucked into Joe’s neck. “That’s what’s done this?”  
  
Joe nods, and his fingers tremble as he pushes them up underneath Nicky’s shirt, needing bare skin under his hands, needing it to be warm with the life that still flows through the man in his lap. “We’d found out about Andy only minutes before.”  
  
“I know,” Nicky says understandingly.  
  
“You didn’t move.” Joe’s voice shakes as much as his hands, and he squeezes his eyes closed to keep the tears at bay. It doesn’t work, more of them slide down his cheeks anyway. “It took you so long to come back.”  
  
Nicky’s hand moves into Joe’s hair. Trying to soothe him, but Joe’s heart is racing again, remembering crawling over across the bloody floor, haunted by Nicky’s motionless body and the back of his head blown out.  
  
“If you hadn’t woken up …” Joe shudders and grips Nicky tighter.  
  
“I did.”  
  
“But if you hadn’t. I wouldn’t have even … it’s not like Andy. We have time left. If that had been your time you would have just been gone in an instant. I never would have been able to say goodbye.”  
  
Nicky lifts his head and pulls back, and Joe is ashamed of the pitiful _no_ that spills from his mouth. Ashamed of the way his hands scramble on Nicky’s back, panicked again, irrationally sure that if Nicky moves away even an inch he’ll disintegrate like sand in Joe’s fingers.  
  
“I’m going nowhere,” Nicky assures quickly. He only sits up, so he can take Joe’s face into his hand, long fingers wiping gently at his tears. There are tears in Nicky’s eyes, too. Big, unhappy ones.  
  
“It won’t stop replaying in my head.”  
  
Nicky reaches behind himself and takes Joe’s hands from off his hips. He gathers them together in his own and brings them up to his lips. One by one he kisses Joe’s knuckles, and when he’s finished he unfolds Joe’s hands and presses them, palms flat, to his own chest. Underneath it, Joe can feel his heartbeat, a dull, even, rhythmic thumping. It infiltrates him, licks at the edges of dark, shadowy corners.  
  
“I’m here,” Nicky repeats. “And so are you. We’re safe. We’re together.”  
  
Joe shakes his head and can’t help another whimper as he tries to speak without sobbing. “You promised you’d stay with me, you promised we would always be together. So many times you’ve told me that.”  
  
“Joe,” Nicky whispers.  
  
“And I know you can’t always keep it, I know it won’t be up to us in the end, but … you promised.”  
  
“I can’t promise one of us won’t die first,” Nicky says heavily. And it is heavy. It has been a constant, crushing weight on their shoulders since the day Andy told them about Lykon. Joe knows Nicky can’t promise that; he can’t promise it in return.  
  
“I know,” he mumbles. He’s so stupid to ask for it. It isn’t fair at all, to beg Nicky to commit to something that was never and will never be in his power to control.  
  
“But I _wish_ I could,” Nicky continues, breathless and sad. “I wish to God I could. I can promise it won’t be my choice. I can promise I will never leave you alone if I have any say in it. I would never want to. You are my person, my heart, my love of a thousand lifetimes. It wounds me so deeply, the way you’re hurting.”  
  
Andy’s words echo once again in Joe’s head. “But you’re hurting, too. You were there, everything that happened also happened to you.”  
  
“It was horrible,” Nicky agrees. “Seeing you suffering, hearing you cry out. Not being able to stop it. You aren’t alone. I am struggling, too.”  
  
“I know you are. And I want to be there for you more than anything and I can’t, I can’t get out of my own head. I just wanted to hold you and make it all go away but every time I looked at you, I couldn’t stop seeing you in pain.”  
  
“Is that what happened last night?”  
  
Joe doesn’t answer.  
  
“We must talk about it. All of it, not only last night. Can’t you see what it’s doing to us?”  
  
Of course Joe can see it. It’s all he can think about, it consumes him like a blizzard. “I’m so sorry,” he mumbles, ablaze with the shame of it.  
  
“It is not your _fault_ , my angel,” Nicky coos. He brushes his nose against Joe’s back and forth, kissing him without lips. “This happened to us, you didn’t cause it.”  
  
Joe shudders through another breath, at more gnawing underneath his skin like there is something alive and violent inside him trying to claw its way out. His hands slide down Nicky’s chest and back around his waist, urging him in closer.  
  
Nicky is gentle about it, but he presses the issue. He hooks a bent finger under Joe’s chin and lifts it, makes Joe look him in the eye. “I need to understand. I have to be able to trust you when you tell me you want something, because if I can’t, if I have to wonder whether you’re pretending …”  
  
He doesn’t finish the sentence. He doesn’t need to. Joe recognizes how thoroughly that would ruin them. He forces the words from some jagged place deep within him; “You moaned and I was back there, suddenly. Listening to them hurt you. Watching you bleed.”  
  
Nicky sighs. His nose moves through Joe’s beard, nuzzling into him. “Pleasure and pain are two sides of the same coin, aren’t they?”  
  
Joe nods again and holds him tighter.  
  
Softly, Nicky tells him, “I would never let you hurt me in a way I didn’t want. We play sometimes, but not like that. I would tell you to stop, and I believe that you would listen.”  
  
“I would, of course I would.”  
  
“I know,” Nicky murmurs. “I’ve never doubted that for a moment. I have known nothing but kindness from your hands. You have filled me with such sweet rapture. You have held me together in your arms for centuries.”  
  
“I don’t want this to break us.” A fresh wave of tears slides down his cheeks and into Nicky’s hair. “But I don’t know what to do.”

“I’m not going away,” Nicky says, warning Joe before he moves, “just rearranging.” 

He backs up off Joe and stands, only to sit next to him instead so he can drape his legs over Joe’s lap and really curl into him. Joe hugs tight around his back with one arm, fingertips digging into softness at Nicky’s side, and the other hand tightly gripping his bicep.

“For right now, we just do this.” Nicky stays pressed against him, heavy in his lap, with his nose in Joe’s beard and his hand cradling Joe’s tear-stained face. “Just stay here with me.”  
  
* * *


	5. Daylight

Joe’s face is warm where it’s tucked into Nicky’s neck. He’s warm everywhere, all the way down, his big body settled safe and close in Nicky’s arms and their legs tangled together. His shoulders move slow and rhythmic as he breathes, small puffs of air from his nose tickling Nicky’s skin.  
  
He’s at peace, maybe for the first time since they’ve been on the island. He’d cried until his eyes ran out of tears and Nicky had cried with him, feeling every lingering inch of what had been done to them, grieving for what’s been taken from them. Nicky hadn’t felt it fully, either, until Joe had broken and given Nicky permission to do it as well. He’d been too preoccupied with worrying for Joe, with the crushing weight of watching him flounder and being unable to help him.  
  
Then he’d pulled Joe up off the couch and back to the bed. He wouldn’t let it become just a place where something had gone so wrong. He couldn’t bear the thought of it, of tainting a dozen lifetimes together twisted in sheets with sure hands and searching kisses and passion wrapped in the ache of soul-deep love. And neither had slept more than a few fitful hours the night before. Joe had let Nicky fold him so easily into his arms, had tucked himself in close and had fallen asleep with Nicky whispering to him and stroking his hair.  
  
He’s still, now. Tranquil. Trusting.  
  
Nicky loves him so much. Sometimes it still overwhelms him. Fills him up to the brim and then some, spilling over to where he can’t contain it all within one single heart. He’d need five or six, maybe, to fit it all. The pain of seeing the man he loves hurt so deeply, by scalpels when they were captured, by the betrayal of their brother, by Nicky dying so soon after they’d found out they’re losing Andy, it’s all built up like a brick wall between them and the wall has crumbled to dust, now, but they’re maybe on even shakier ground than they were before.  
  
But for the moment, Joe breathes soft and steady where he’s nestled in Nicky’s arms, and Nicky breathes with him. He lets it cleanse him. He doesn’t sleep, but he rests. Keeping watch, keeping his Joe safe.  
  
Joe wakes slowly, after an hour or so, coming back to consciousness gradually as he often does. It’s lucky Nicky sleeps much lighter and was blessed with quicker reflexes; if they had to count solely on Joe, they’d be ambushed a lot more than they are. He stirs, nose nuzzling underneath Nicky’s jaw, instinctively seeking warmth. Nicky slides his palm gently up the arm Joe has gripped around his middle, the fingernails of his other hand scratch lightly through Joe’s hair, along his scalp.  
  
Joe makes a noise as he exhales, a small, contented hum.  
  
“I’m here,” Nicky murmurs to him. It might not be necessary, even half-asleep Joe likely wouldn’t mistake Nicky’s touch for anyone else’s, but just in case. He won’t take chances right now, not when Joe is so fragile.  
  
It’s another minute before Joe’s fingers curl in the fabric of Nicky’s t-shirt and his lips press deliberately into Nicky’s neck. “Did you sleep?” he asks in a quiet, scratchy voice.  
  
“No,” Nicky answers, “but I liked holding you.”  
  
Joe exhales noisly. His whole body moves with it, and Nicky senses another storm coming so he heads it off at the pass. He nudges Joe’s face with his nose, wordlessly urging to tilt his chin up so Nicky can kiss him. Their lips slide together, languid and a little sleepy.  
  
“We are together,” Nicky tells him, pausing mid-sentence to briefly lick at Joe’s luscious bottom lip because he can’t ever resist it, “and I love you deeper than the ocean. In this moment, that is the only thing that matters to me. Not where we’ve been or what might lie ahead of us. Just right now.”  
  
Joe moves, restless against Nicky, kissing him more urgently and pressing his hips forward. He’d been half-hard already, and Nicky had too, just from the warmth and the proximity to each other that their bodies know so intimately.  
  
Nicky slides his hand down from Joe’s arm, travelling across his back to cup his backside through his jeans and press him in closer. The fabric in between them is maddening, when all Nicky wants is to feel him, bare and heated.  
  
Joe says his name again, the syllables uttered desperately into a wet kiss, and Nicky’s head spins with how quickly he went from something like quiet meditation to the pulsing thrums of arousal thick and hot in his veins. Joe’s always had that effect on him. He stills Joe, though, because he needs to know. Nicky has been needing him like this for two weeks by now, needing to find _them_ again in all this chaos, but he can’t have it go wrong again. They can regroup and rebuild from it once, but maybe not twice.  
  
“Are you sure?” he asks, hand splaying on Joe’s lower back instead of his ass, pushed up under his shirt to get at his skin. He brushes his nose against Joe’s once, twice. “Please don’t tell me you are if you’re not.”  
  
“I wanted you yesterday, too. I just couldn’t stop remembering them hurting you,” Joe whispers.  
  
He shifts. Their hips rub together, and they can feel each other trapped in denim. Nicky remembers so vividly, as if it were only days ago, the very first time Joe touched him. He thinks of it often. The way it had made him fall apart, the way conflicting emotions had curled within him, desire mixed with sin like blood in water. The way Joe had saved him, the way nothing was ever the same again after Nicky had been touched like that. He could never go back to who he was in the before, and he’s never wanted to.  
  
“Tell me how I can fix it.”  
  
“I don’t know,” Joe answers. He sounds frustrated by it, and so sad, like he thinks he’s letting Nicky down. He couldn’t, but Nicky doesn’t know how to say that in a way that Joe would believe it right now.  
  
He kisses him again. Soft passes of their lips, Nicky’s tongue dipping into Joe’s mouth and Joe chasing after it to suck on it for just a moment before he lets it go. His leg moves, thigh rubbing between Nicky’s legs, sending sparks along his spine.  
  
“Don’t think, then. Your body knows mine, like this.” Nicky cups Joe’s bearded cheek in his hand and angles his face for a deeper kiss, one he can feel to his toes. “Just touch me however you need, whatever you need to breathe again. I’m yours.”  
  
Joe doesn’t answer. His kiss grows hesitant, not pulling away but not surging forward either like Nicky had been expecting him to. He’d taken charge, last night, unable to contain the desperate clawing inside his chest. He’d taken control away from Joe, made him feel vulnerable. He was sure, only a moment ago, that Joe would want it this way, this time. That he’d want to orchestrate every moment of it so he could protect Nicky all the while. He was wrong, it seems.  
  
“Oh,” Nicky says, understanding, “you want me, instead? To take care of you?”  
  
Joe’s shoulders slump as his head barely nods, as if he’s ashamed. It’s unlike him. He’s always been open and generous and unembarrassed of the ways they can love, since their very first kiss, but maybe he is a little, this time. Ashamed to need as deeply as he does just now.  
  
“I love you,” Nicky murmurs to him. His thumb strokes along a soft patch of skin just above Joe’s beard as he makes promises into his lips. “It is the most beautiful thing in the world, when you have need for me and you allow me to worship you.”  
  
“I love you so much,” Joe breathes. “Please.”  
  
Nicky shushes him gently. Joe should never have to beg, should never have to doubt for even one second that Nicky will gladly give him everything he needs. He spends just another minute dragging their lips together because it’s too nice to give up so quickly, even though he’ll be back to it within moments.  
  
Joe melts against him like wet sand.  
  
Nicky asks him, “can I undress you?”  
  
Joe nods fervently, already tugging at his own shirt even though he’s still lying half on top of Nicky and couldn’t possibly remove it without getting up.  
  
Nicky chuckles. “Up you get,” he chides, patting Joe lightly on the shoulder. He laughs again when Joe whines quietly about it. “Come on, handsome.”  
  
He detangles them and rolls up off the mattress, reaching for Joe’s hand to pull him to his feet. He makes quick work of it because Joe still has that look on his face; a little sad, a little lost, a lot needy. He pulls Joe’s shirt up over his head and helps him with his jeans, revealing golden-brown skin inch by gorgeous inch until it’s all before him. Smooth expanses of it, curved over toned muscles, strong arms and his tapered waist. The artful smattering of dark hair on his chest. The thicker black curls low on his abdomen.  
  
Unable to help himself, Nicky trails fingertips up Joe’s sides so he shivers, dipping down to press a kiss to his clavicle. How well he knows this body. How profoundly he has loved it.  
  
“Bello,” he whispers. “You have always been beautiful.”  
  
Joe’s exhale is unsteady. His hands fumble with the hem of Nicky’s shirt, and Nicky shakes his head and leans up to take Joe’s mouth in another kiss.  
  
“Let me take care of you,” he murmurs, reminding Joe of what he’d been brave enough to ask for, even though he hadn’t done it in words. He pushes gently with a hand in the center of Joe’s chest. “Lie back.”  
  
Joe listens, letting Nicky help him back onto the mattress, head landing on the pillow and his body laid out for Nicky like a precious jewel nestled delicately on a silk cushion. For just a moment the sight of him takes Nicky’s breath away, as if it isn’t a wonder he’s been happily gazing upon for nine centuries.  
  
He pulls quickly at his own clothes, worried suddenly at the prospect of leaving Joe like that for too long, bare and exposed and anticipating. Nicky wants to protect him more than he wants to draw breath into his lungs or blood into his heart. He doesn’t want Joe thinking even for a moment that Nicky might abandon him; ever, in any place or time or for any reason, but especially now.  
  
The heat grows in Joe’s eyes as Nicky hastily strips himself, and Joe’s arms lift to reach for him as soon as Nicky is naked. Nicky would rather saw off a limb than refuse him. He climbs back onto the bed, the mattress dipping under his weight, and settles melded to Joe’s side and propped up on one elbow so he can take Joe’s face in his free hand and bring it back into a kiss.  
  
Joe grips him, his arms wrapping around Nicky a little too tight like he’s worried Nicky might disintegrate if he doesn’t hold onto him. Nicky soothes him with warm passes of his lips and another whispered promise that he’s here, and they’re safe. Joe still vibrates with need against him but his arms slacken their grip, still clinging but not with quite the same desperation.  
  
Even though he’s said it over and over, Nicky repeats, “I love you,” as he nips gently at Joe’s lip and slides one hand down, thumbs brushing over dark nipples, fingertips dancing along his taut stomach, reaching for the hardness between his legs and curling his fingers around it.  
  
Joe gasps softly and shudders as Nicky strokes him, instantly finding the rhythm that belongs to them. He knows just how Joe fits in his hand, just how to twist his wrist so his palm drags along it.  
  
“Talk to me,” Nicky requests. He noses into Joe’s beard, soft and plush. He smells clean and like sleep, and Nicky inhales, drawing Joe into all the cavernous places left inside of him. “No lying here quietly and hoping we’re on the same page. Not now. Tell me how you’re feeling.”  
  
“Good,” Joe breathes. His eyes flutter closed and his hips twitch as Nicky squeezes him.  
  
“What do you want?”  
  
Joe just shakes his head. His lips part and he looks helplessly up at Nicky, his dark eyes wide and shining, so much raw emotion reflected in them that it breaks Nicky’s heart. This man is usually so strong, so steadfast. He is their rock, Nicky knows. The foundation upon which the rest of them can find sure footing. Andy broods. Booker drinks and is overwhelmed by memories that are much fresher than anyone else’s. Nicky himself gets lost in his mind, in calculations and planning and worrying about his family. Joe’s presence is always bright and affirming and larger than life. They can always count on him for a smile and a joke and a bear-hug, when the rest of them are dragged down in darkness. He isn’t only Nicky’s sunshine. He’s a life-force for them all. He sustains them.  
  
He’s wounded, this time. More profoundly than usual. He’s stumbled and he’s grasping for a life-raft, and Nicky can be that. He’d never want the responsibility to fall to anyone else.  
  
And Joe doesn’t answer Nicky’s question, and Nicky understands that he can’t. He can’t make choices, he needs Nicky to make them. Needs Nicky to be the strong one.  
  
He kisses Joe’s cheek. “Reach in the drawer?”  
  
Joe nods in relief. He leans over just long enough to get what they need from the nightstand, surrendering so beautifully to the kiss Nicky presses to his lips as he takes the bottle from Joe’s trembling hand.  
  
“Where are you?” he asks, as he trails sticky fingers back down Joe’s stomach and nudges him to lift one leg, planting his foot on the mattress, so Nicky can reach lower between them. He pets gently at intimate places, making Joe aware of him, relaxing him before he slides just the tip of one finger inside. He repeats the question when Joe doesn’t answer, pulling Joe back into the moment. Grounding him in their reality. Keeping him from slipping back into unpleasant memories.  
  
“A fleabag motel in Valetta,” Joe answers, on a shaky exhale. “With the man I love.”  
  
“That sounds nice,” Nicky teases. He rests their foreheads together and slides his finger in the rest of the way, Joe’s body opening easily for him. They were made to fit together this way. “Does he love you back?”  
  
Joe hums and his lips curve into a smile against Nicky’s cheek. His fingers tangle in Nicky’s hair. “He says he does. Sometimes in half a dozen languages.”  
  
“Do you doubt him?”  
  
“No. Never. I always know he loves me.”  
  
Nicky teases at his entrance with a second finger, adding it slowly while his stomach swoops in anticipation. Joe is so lovely like this, trusting him; placing a 900-year-old heart in Nicky’s hands and trusting him to handle it with care. It is the honor of Nicky’s life to do so. “Oh, he’s adored you since the very first time you smiled at him. And parted all the clouds in his stormy mind.”  
  
He parts his fingers as he says it, testing the resistance, warming inside as Joe’s response falls away on a heartfelt moan.  
  
“Nicolò,” he sighs. It sounds like poetry in his beautiful voice, like music.  
  
“My Yusuf,” Nicky returns. He curls his fingers and swallows Joe’s responding cry in a kiss. “Do you remember our first time?”  
  
Joe nods. A broken _please_ falls from his lips as Nicky strokes him inside with insistent fingers.  
  
“You showed me everything,” Nicky tells him. If there are to be flashes of the past running though Joe’s mind, Nicky wants them to be pleasant ones. “How to love, how to make someone feel nice, how to let myself have all those things. My guide, my teacher.”  
  
Joe’s handful of Nicky’s hair tightens to the point of pain, and the contrast to the warm pleasure of his hips pressed against Joe’s thigh sends shivers down Nicky’s spine. Not letting their lips part, Nicky reaches for the bottle again to spread the gel over his own swollen flesh. He adjusts, pushing up to his knees between Joe’s legs and holding Joe’s hand in his, fingers laced together against the mattress, as he slides forward carefully into Joe’s yielding body. It’s heavenly, as it always is.  
  
“You kissed me and I forgot how to speak,” Nicky murmurs.  
  
He works himself inside in easy rolls of his hips, talking the whole time so Joe stays with him. Slow and deliberate, feeling every inch of it, not wild and desperate like the night before when Joe had so easily mistaken Nicky’s cries of pleasure for such recent cries of pain that still echo within the walls of his mind. Nicky can still hear them, too; the hours they’d spent in such agonizing captivity seared into him like a brand. He grounds himself, as well, in the moment they have right now, and in the lifetime they’ve shared together.  
  
“I’d wanted to touch you for months,” Joe whispers. “I was going mad with it.”  
  
“Tell me where you are,” Nicky asks again.  
  
Joe’s hands wrap around the back of his neck as Nicky pushes forward one last time and is fully sheathed inside of him. As close as they can be, connected in body like they always have been in soul. “Here. With you. Making love to me.”  
  
“Like we have a hundred thousand times. Maybe more. How do you feel?”  
  
“Full. Warm.”  
  
“Loved?”  
  
“Yes,” Joe breathes.  
  
“You are. I loved you then, too. That night outside Odesa in a windswept field, with rain outside our tent. You touched me and I soared. No one ever had. I never had.”  
  
Joe pauses. “You?”  
  
“Temptations of the flesh, they called it.” Nicky chuckles, remembering, and presses a slow kiss to Joe’s forehead. He moves, dragging his hips back and then forth, fucking Joe slowly. “When we would grow hard, we would pray until it subsided. We weren’t supposed to give into it, it was sinful. When we were together that first night, when you laid me out and wrapped your hand around me, that was the first time I ever did give in.”  
  
“Nicolò,” Joe murmurs. “900 years and you never told me that.”  
  
Nicky reaches for Joe’s left leg, lifts it from underneath the knee, urges him to wrap it around Nicky’s waist so the angle shifts. So he’s brushing along Joe’s prostate with every languid roll of his hips. His skin prickles everywhere, consumed with desire for the man underneath him. “It felt like the most exquisite explosions inside of me, the things your hands did.”  
  
“To me, too.”  
  
“So you see, my body has never belonged to me. That is the point. It belonged to God, and then it belonged to you. Now it will always, always belong to you. Not to a doctor or a businessman who wants to profit off of our gift. I was not theirs to steal. I’m yours.”  
  
Joe shudders underneath him. Whether it’s in emotion or a bodily response to a particularly deep thrust, Nicky couldn’t tell. Maybe both. Maybe there isn’t a difference.  
  
“Did you think it was sinful? What we did that night?” Joe asks. There is the lilt of a tease in his voice, and it makes Nicky’s heart sing, to hear him joking. Joe’s eyes still shine with the residue of all that they’ve been through, and there are tears on his cheeks, slipping down his flushed skin. Underneath all the tragedy, though, he’s smiling.  
  
Nicky smiles back at him but answers him seriously, because it’s always been important. “No, my love. It was divine. I was never allowed to want anything. You were the first thing I ever really desired. And how I desired you. How you stirred my blood, the ways I wanted you to touch me. The way I wanted to get lost in you. The way I still do.”  
  
“ _Fuck_ ,” Joe moans as Nicky drives a little quicker into him.  
  
“Stay with me.”  
  
“I am,” Joe promises, on another lovely, broken moan. “I’m here.”  
  
Nicky presses forward and stays, grinding his hips as his tongue slips back into Joe’s mouth, losing himself in the extasy of it. But he isn’t lost, not as long as Joe’s arms are around him. He’s right where he belongs. They both are.  
  
* * *


	6. Rainbow

The sun wakes them.  
  
It filters in through the gap in the drapes, rousing Joe as it falls across his face and turns the insides of his eyelids blood red instead of black. He frowns, trying to hide from it but burying his face into Nicky’s hair. Nicky is slotted against him, head on the pillow next to Joe’s, their tight embrace relaxed in sleep but still nestled close together. When Joe can’t get the right angle to block out the sun, he rolls away from it again and toward the man sleeping beside him. Nicky stirs, awake but wishing he wasn’t yet, like Joe. They pretend just for another few moments, noses touching as Joe curls into him.  
  
“Good morning,” he whispers, without opening his eyes. Nicky’s bare skin is warm and soft under his hands. Joe slides his palm up Nicky’s arm and lets it settle around the back of his neck.  
  
“Hello, my love,” Nicky whispers back. He bumps Joe’s nose with his own and then presses a gentle kiss to his lips. “How did you sleep?”  
  
“Very well,” Joe answers honestly. It’s been so long since he could truthfully say that. He was tired in such a bone-deep way, that he’s not sure he fully noticed it. It had just become normal, part of his reality to be tender in his muscles and nursing a constant dull headache, all the while afraid to sleep too deeply for the nightmares that might come back. Last night, undone by heartbreak and crumbled into pebbles and pieced lovingly back together in Nicky’s hands, Joe had slipped into blissful unconsciousness with Nicky in his arms and barely moved an inch until the sun announced a new day had begun and they could start again.  
  
“I’m glad.” Nicky’s hand cups his cheek, fingertips scratching lightly in his beard. They’ve sported many different looks over the centuries to fit in with ever-shifting trends, but Joe has so rarely been clean-shaven, even when it’s been unfashionable, because Nicky likes him bearded as he was when they met. It’s such a small thing on the endless list of things Joe would do for this man.  
  
“You?” Joe asks.  
  
Nicky nods. “Very well, also. It felt back to normal, a little bit. Or at least as close to normal as we ever have.”  
  
Joe winces. Thinking of Nicky in this bed all week, feeling alone and like Joe was so far away from him even though physically there was only a foot between them, has guilt creeping back up his spine. “I’m sorry.”  
  
“Shh,” Nicky soothes. He drapes his leg over Joe’s and kisses his lips again. “None of that. It isn’t your fault. And we will be alright.”  
  
“Yeah?” Joe can’t help the waver in his voice or the hopeful swoop in his gut.  
  
“Of course.”  
  
“Okay.” It still feels precarious but Joe believes him.  
  
Nicky stretches and then relaxes back against the mattress, shuffling in even closer and tucking his head under Joe’s chin. Joe wraps him up, envelopes him into his arms, feeling Nicky warm and trusting against him. He’s lived and breathed for the feeling ever since the first time, when they’d huddled together for warmth against the cold outside their tent and Joe had felt something tangible deep in his chest come alive the moment the feisty, temperamental, argumentative Italian was in his arms. Nicky isn’t that man anymore. His fury is more justified, his fierceness directed at more noble causes than holy theft, his edges softened. The kind and sensitive child within him returned, after the church and the knighthood that had sharpened him were no longer forces at play. The first time Joe had seen him smile – really, truly smile, the kind that creased his skin and had his clear eyes dancing – he remembers thinking nothing would be the same again and being perfectly pleased by that development.  
  
“What are you thinking?” Nicky asks. His fingers curl against Joe’s chest, nails lightly scraping against his skin.  
  
“Of you,” Joe answers. “And us.”  
  
Nicky hums contentedly. “My favorite subject.”  
  
Joe laughs. “Are you so conceited?”  
  
“So what if I am?”  
  
“So nothing,” Joe concedes. He kisses Nicky’s forehead and leaves his lips lingering there. “It’s my favorite subject, too.”  
  
Nicky exhales deeply and snuggles in yet another inch. Joe didn’t think there was that much space between them, but Nicky finds it and removes it. Everything surrounding him smells like _them_ , like warmth and dried sweat and the beautiful mess they’d made of each other the night before. _You stink like sex_ , Andy would quip at them if she were here. Nicky would blush furiously and Joe would apologize while not actually being sorry about it at all. He loves the way they smell.  
  
“Would you do something for me?” Nicky asks.  
  
Joe smiles into his forehead. “Anything. Everything.”  
  
“That's good to know. I don’t need absolutely everything right at this moment,” Nicky teases.  
  
“Tell me what and it’s yours.”  
  
“Take a bubble bath. Let me slip out for a short while. I promise I’ll be back.”  
  
Joe frowns and jostles Nicky’s body playfully. “What are you plotting?”  
  
“You’ll see. Trust me?”  
  
“You know I do.”  
  
Joe thinks that he can’t remember the last time he did this, as he fills the cracked porcelain tub with steaming water and foamy soap and sinks himself slowly into it. He hadn’t been tense but he melts anyway, muscles turning to liquid in the warmth. He tips his head back, leaning it comfortably against the tile, and soaks, as Nicky had requested. He’d kissed Joe soundly before he left, with sleep-messy hair and in yesterday’s clothes, wrinkled from resting for the night in a heap on the floor next to Joe’s. He snickers to himself, imagining Nicky out in the world in that state, still undeniably handsome but dishevelled.  
  
He doesn’t think much about what he’s in here waiting for. He does trust Nicky, with every atom that comprises his body. He’d meant that, when he said it.  
  
By the time Nicky returns, Joe is dried and dressed, sitting in a folding chair on their balcony with his ankles resting up on the railing. It’s been raining on and off all morning, but now the sun is shining and, in the distance, a rainbow peeks out over the field of rooftops.  
  
Joe points to it as Nicky joins him, and Nicky smiles in its direction.  
  
He kisses Joe and then takes his hand, and Joe follows him without hesitation.  
  
They walk with their fingers intertwined, over damp cobblestones, past new buildings and ancient structures, although nothing as old as them. For over an hour they stroll, chatting about nothing and everything, and Joe never asks. He only follows where Nicky leads. Nicky takes him through great stone archways and suddenly they are surrounded by greenery. Trees, trimmed hedges, expansive flowerbeds. A calm pool in the center of the garden, high up and overlooking the water. It is mostly deserted. Across the way, a mother and two children move along a stone path, the children excitedly leaning over to stick their noses into yellow blossoms.  
  
Joe looks at Nicky and raises an eyebrow in question. Nicky squeezes his hand and wordlessly pulls him along, toward a particularly spectacular flowering bush. Without an explanation, he lets go of Joe’s hand and starts to pluck flowers from it.  
  
“Are you allowed to do that?” Joe asks.  
  
“Likely not, it’s a public space. Keep a look out, would you?”  
  
Joe snorts. “Yes, I’ll protect you from the flower police.”  
  
“My hero.” Nicky winks at him.  
  
“ _Why_ are you doing that?”  
  
“Hush.” Nicky keeps picking, gathering the petals into his crooked left arm. When it’s full, he turns to Joe with twinkling in his eyes and takes one of the blooms. He holds it up close to Joe’s head and pokes the stem of it into Joe’s tight curls, winding his hair around it so it’s stays once he lets it go. Nicky smiles up at it, pleased with himself, and does another, and then another.  
  
Joe doesn’t speak. He isn’t sure what he would say. He just watches, enraptured by the tiny frown of concentration wrinkling Nicky’s brow and the way the tip of his tongue is poking out of the side of his mouth. One by one, Nicky works the flowers in, taking seriously the placement of each one, until Joe’s entire head must be covered with them like some kind of botanical headdress. When his arm is empty Nicky steps back to survey his careful work. Joe’s sure he has a look of confusion and incredulity sketched across his face but Nicky looks at his hair instead, decorated in fuchsia, and nods in satisfaction.  
  
“Should I be worried you’ve lost your mind?”  
  
Nicky grins at him. His shoulders shake in laughter. “No.” He reaches into the bag he’d brought with them, that he’d set down on the ground before he began adorning Joe in flowers, and pulls out a Polaroid camera.  
  
“Where did you get that?”  
  
“I will return it.”  
  
Joe’s eyes widen. “Nicky!” he admonishes.  
  
Nicky grins impishly and shrugs. “I am nine-hundred and fifty-one years old. My life would have been very boring if I didn’t break a few laws every now and then.”  
  
“At least tell me you stole it from a store and not a person.”  
  
“Of course I did.” Nicky holds it up, raising his eyebrows, and Joe huffs in fondness and exasperation and poses for him. Nicky takes the picture. The print emerges and he shakes it gently to develop it in the air. He shows it to Joe. The garden and ocean and ancient stonework are in the background, and Joe, with a head covered in flowers and a bemused expression, hardly looks like himself in the foreground. Joe remembers looking into the mirror at the motel days ago and thinking how different he appeared, as if his lifeforce had been drained from him. In the picture, he sparkles.  
  
“Oh,” he says softly, dragging gentle fingertips over his own face as the color brightens in the oxygen.  
  
“There it is,” Nicky says softly, standing close beside him.  
  
“There what is?”  
  
Nicky brushes the pad of his thumb along Joe’s lower lip. “That smile. I have so missed seeing you smile.”  
  
“I haven’t smiled?”  
  
“You have, but not properly. Not like this, since the lab. When we talked about being here. That is the last time I saw it.”  
  
“Nicky,” Joe whispers.  
  
Nicky turns away from him just for long enough to pluck one more flower from the poor bush, and he winds its stem into Joe’s beard, off to one side so it isn’t in the way of his mouth. “So beautiful when you smile. You should have been an artist’s muse.”  
  
“I’m the artist,” Joe reminds him. “You’re my muse.”  
  
“How much do I love you?” Nicky asks. Joe knows what’s coming next, because it always does when Nicky asks that, and they say it together. “ _More than yesterday, but not as much as tomorrow_.”  
  
“And you had the audacity,” Joe says, with an emotional sniff, “to call _me_ an incurable romantic.”  
  
Nicky takes both of his hands, bringing them up one by one to kiss Joe’s knuckles. His eyes are bright, shining with sincerity in the late morning sunshine.  
  
“What was this for?” Joe asks, motioning with his eyes up toward his hairline.  
  
“I saw the garden in a brochure.” Nicky shrugs. The color rises in his cheeks, sweetly embarrassed but holding Joe’s gaze. “I thought perhaps you deserved to be art. And that we should remember this week. So we don’t lose each other again.”  
  
Joe shakes his head, frowning and smiling all at once. “We won’t. I promise.”  
  
“The thing is …” Nicky continues, “you said I was your moon, when that horrible man was taunting us. Perhaps I am, but you, Yusuf al-Kaysani, are the sun. You bring warmth and light to my life, you are the fuel that allows me to grow like these blossoms. And the moon only ever shines because it is reflecting something brighter. If I am your light in darkness, it is only because you were mine first.”  
  
In his chest, Joe’s heart flutters. It sends tendrils of warmth along his arms and down into his stomach. He leans forward to take Nicky’s lips in a kiss, with ocean air wrapping around them.  
  
* * *  
  
The flight across the ocean in the back of a cargo plane is long, and the hike into the jungle is longer.  
  
They pass the time as they always do, with both deep and idle conversation, with reminiscing and exchanging easy kisses. Joe laughs when Nicky teases him, and happily teases back, and Nicky’s heart soars. Nothing is fixed, because this wasn’t a table with a wobbly leg that could simply be screwed in tighter and returned to its former glory as easy as that. Nicky thinks something vital has been taken from them, and he’s not sure they can retrieve it. They might just have to learn to live without it. They can, though. That much he knows for sure. They lost Quynh, and Nicky misses her daily but they carried on, because they had to. There were people to save, there was life to live. They figured out how to smile again in her absence. They didn’t forget what they’d lost; they learned to exist with it.  
  
There is still something haunted behind Joe’s eyes, sometimes. Nicky’s sure it’s there behind his, too. He doesn’t imagine that will change any time soon. But when Joe wraps Nicky into his arms on the floor of the plane so they can sleep, Nicky feels his home rematerialize in the familiar embrace.  
  
The safehouse near the river hasn’t changed in appearance since the last time they were here, years ago. There are lights on inside. Joe takes his hand before they cross the grass toward it, kissing the back of Nicky’s palm and smiling reassuringly at him.  
  
Nicky nods at him and smiles back.  
  
Joe, because he’s Joe, practically kicks the peeling wooden door in off its hinges. “My girls!” he shouts.  
  
Andy and Nile stare at them, both clearly startled nearly out of their wits by Joe’s unnecessarily dramatic entrance.  
  
“ _Fuck_ you,” Andy breathes. She drops a stick from her hand – one end sharpened menacingly into a point that she could certainly end a life with – onto the table. It bounces loudly as wood meets wood. Despite her words, she jogs over toward them and ungracefully jumps up at Joe. He catches her, laughing, in a bone-crushing hug. “Thought we were under fucking attack, you couldn’t have made a more delicate entrance?”  
  
“I don’t do anything delicate, Boss, you know that,” Joe jokes.  
  
“I wish I didn’t.” Andy’s smiling at him, and shaking her head, caught exactly halfway between affectionate and annoyed.  
  
She looks the same, too. Nicky was half-expecting mortality to ooze off her in palpable waves of vulnerability, but of course it doesn’t. She’s still their friend, their big sister, their fearless leader. If anything, she’s more determined than she was before. Revitalized, reminded that what they’ve done for centuries has made a difference, even if none of them could see it as clearly as when it was laid out before them in charts and photographs and corporeal evidence. Nicky had needed that, as well as Andy. He hadn’t realized how much he needed it until it was in front of his face.  
  
Joe releases Andy and bounces off toward the couch where Nile had been sitting, probably very peacefully, before he scared them.  
  
Andy turns her gaze to Nicky. Her smile softens. He reaches for her and folds her into his arms, holding her close to him. Her fingers, as they always do, cradle the back of his head, lovingly stroking his hair. “Hi, gorgeous,” she murmurs.  
  
“We missed you,” he says, and means it. He’s not sure he could survive without the time he gets alone with Joe. Without _them_ , without being able to touch him and hold him close at night and kiss him as if its as necessary for survival as a heartbeat. But he always misses his family.  
  
“We missed you, too,” Joe is telling Nile, across the dingy room.  
  
Andy pulls back enough to see his face, searching it with her ever-perceptive eyes. “You good?” she asks.  
  
Nicky nods, and the smile he gives back to her is as honest as they get. “We’re good.”  
  
* * *

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading and for all your lovely comments!!
> 
> Come talk to me [on tumblr](http://paper-storm.tumblr.com/) if you want!
> 
> Follow the link below to see some gorgeous art created for this story 💛

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [2 for 1 gifts](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28242252) by [bloodsuitsandtears](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bloodsuitsandtears/pseuds/bloodsuitsandtears)




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